I currently use Hootsuite to manage all my Twitter accounts and find this to be one of the best web-based tools you’ll ever need! Once you have connected your Twitter accounts to Hootsuite you can then set up automated searches relating to keywords in your industry. This enables you to monitor certain conversations for your keywords.

For example, with one of my hair studio clients, I set up a search with the keywords “Haircut & Leeds”, so If anyone mentioned these 2 words in their tweet it would show up in the search feed. I can then get in touch with them straight away and offer them a discount on their first haircut. This method alone generated a ROI of 500% for this client.

What you need to be doing on a daily basis

Depending on the size of your audience you may only need to spend around 30 minutes per day updating and interacting with your profiles. I usually have a set of processes I run through at the start of every day for Facebook and Twitter, they consist of the following:

Open Hootsuite

Check Twitter account for @mentions – write suitable reply

Check automated search feeds – reply & RT as appropriate

Retweet content that you enjoy – you can schedule these so they aren’t all tweeted at once

Follow at least 10 users in your target market everyday – many of these will follow you back and help grow your following

Log-in to Facebook Fan Page

Reply to all comments and wall posts

Schedule engaging post including a photo or video

Check home feed – like other fan pages (acting as your fan page)

Comment on other fan pages – join discussions, share content

You will also want to subscribe to relevant blogs in your industry using an RSS feed (feedburner). Check the latest articles every morning making sure you leave an insightful comment or 2; you can use this content to tweet or post on Facebook.

Other social networks such as YouTube, Google+ and forums play a huge role in social media; so do not ignore these other channels. I recommend using your research from the Listening step to decide where to focus the majority of your time – where your audience is.

Content Strategy

It’s a good idea to build in content hooks for your audience, such as “Motivational Monday”, this will give them something to look forward to every Monday, so they will check back if it’s something of interest to them. Having a structure of what topics you will be posting about and how much promotion you will be doing can make management easier and quicker. I usually stick to the rule of 1 promotional piece of content for every 7 pieces of valuable content.

Find out what is and isn’t working with your audience and then focus on the good stuff! It’s important to keep testing as you may find a random photo actually ends up being your most shared post of the week (I know I have)!

Audience Building

Engaging with your audience on a personal level is key to building a relationship with them. Offer them free content, offer or discount in exchange for a like, share, tweet or e-mail address. They need a reason to engage with your and share your content so include emotional motivators when posting content and try to tap into the drives that attracted them in the first place.

Using a competition (on Facebook) is a great way to build your audience FAST! After all who doesn’t want something for free! There are a couple of top notch 3rd party apps that can host your competition (facebook guidelines) and help you maximize the viral nature of Facebook to create massive buzz. Be as creative as your can, your audience will really appreciate the thought and originality that has gone into it.

This post will have given you a good idea of where to start when managing your social media campaign. If there is anything else you do on a daily basis that I’ve missed out, please let me know in the comments. The next step is to Optimize!